(even though, whether in the work of Deleuze or of Deleuze and Guattari,
they scarcely survived beyond it). Expelling the subject from its central position,
the philosophy of assemblages (as they say, ‘philosophy of praxis’) is hardly
indulgent towards the individual subject of bourgeois liberalism. But it has
no more sympathy for the mass subject of Marxism (class as a collective
subject). The origin of action – the agent – is, here, the non-structured, as yet
non-reified group, in a constant state of variation or metamorphosis. This
savours of May 1968, understood as an anti-authoritarian revolt. And this
(something that is wholly positive) makes it possible to take account of the
emergence of new political subjects (women, psychiatric patients in hospitals,
prisoners, immigrant workers). Some of these subjects have faded away;
others occupy the front of the stage: the balance-sheet of the priority accorded
the molecular remains to be drawn up. But this pair of concepts, through a
shift internal to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, gave rise to two other
concepts, which, in my view, are far more important: the concepts of majority
and minority. Here, it is no longer a matter of social molecularity, or of political
minority, but of linguistic and literary minority. A major language, such as
what is called standard English (or rather a major usage of the language), is
constantly rendered minoritarian by a multitude of minor dialects, registers,
and styles. A minor literary text (the canonical example is Kafka)^24 has no
need to call with all its heart for socialist revolution, or to describe in detail
the most deleterious effects of capitalist exploitation; from the outset, it is
collective, political, and deterritorialised.
In Deleuze and Guattari, we are therefore dealing with a systematic
displacement of Marxist concepts. They think within Marxism, certainly
more directly than the Derrida of Specters of Marx, even if their wanderings or
lines of flight lead them rather far from this starting-point. To be convinced of
this, it is enough to compare the treatment of Marx and Freud in Capitalism
and Schizophrenia: the former is practically never mentioned, but provides an
intellectual framework; the second is referred to on virtually every page, in
person or in the shape of one of his avatars – but is subjected to a systematic,
often ferocious critique.
If readers will grant me this displacement, and hence point of origin, a
question remains: why undertake this journey and what have we to gain, as
128 • Chapter Five
(^24) See Deleuze and Guattari 1986.